Post-2000 enrollment map and Waukee stats
Office Lounge invitation at bottom
Since this year’s annual school enrollment column put a lot of focus on education savings accounts, here’s a supplement covering other bits of data.
Thanks to a spreadsheet that now has 25 years of information, I have been able to create a state map that shows the change in certified enrollment of districts that cover exactly the same area that they did in 2000 or have minimal difference. The excluded districts consolidated or added substantial area from a bordering district, including forced dissolutions. The map shows a lot of bleeding in rural areas.
Maps created in 2016 along the same theme, with a 2001-15 timeframe, are on the Iowa Highway Ends blog.
In the map above, half of the length of the green bar is attributable to Waukee alone, with an increase of nearly 500% from 2000. Second place is Bondurant-Farrar, at 199%. That leads us to…
The annual ‘Waukee did WHAT’ statistical roundup
Waukee has dislodged Davenport as Iowa’s fourth-largest school district.
Waukee’s enrollment increased by the entire student population of Baxter, and that was supported by its 11th elementary school opening last August.
In four years, Waukee has added the entire enrollment of North Scott, which is the state’s 33rd-largest district.
Waukee has doubled in enrollment since Chet Culver left the governor’s office. Clear Creek Amana and Bondurant-Farrar have nearly done the same, but started at much lower baselines.
The number of students living inside Waukee’s boundaries but open-enrolling to Dowling Catholic High School (261) translates to a BEDS number of a Class 1A football-sized school.
The total number of students living inside Waukee’s boundaries and going to any private school (1,399) would tie Nevada as Iowa’s 75th-largest district.
Miscellany
A range breakdown for education savings accounts, according to a state press release Jan. 15: 44 public school districts do not have anyone using ESAs, 118 have 1 to 9 students, 98 have between 10 and 99 students, 60 have 100 to 1,000, and five — Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, Sioux City, Davenport, and Des Moines — have more than 1,000.
Just because districts have consolidated doesn’t mean enrollment has grown. The combined enrollments of then-separate Prairie Valley and Southeast Webster-Grand districts in 2010-11 was 1172.1. The 2024-25 total for Southeast Valley is 1105.1. That’s relatively stable. However, the enrollments of then-separate Garner-Hayfield and Ventura in 2010 totaled 1,046.8, and now Garner-Hayfield-Ventura combined is 824.
The combined enrollment of Webster City and Northeast Hamilton was 2,029 in 2000, and now, after the former has absorbed the latter, the enrollment is 1,745. Current (consolidated) acronym champion OABCIG had separate certified enrollments totaling 1,300 in 2000 and is now at 907.
Official statistics record 344 nonbinary students in public schools statewide this year, a number only kept since 2021-22. There is no equivalent column in the private-school table.
The life span of that last item may be short. Legislation currently racing through the Iowa Legislature to remove protections for gender identity in state law also mandates that all vital statistics identify people in the data as male or female.